skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's normally one every month or so (it depends a bit on when Dmitri and the other organisers have enough of their time they generously donate), so if you can't make this one you can just look forward to another in the future.
Analytical Engine sounds brilliant. Could you drop me an email on d.grabov@gmail.com and we'll arrange it all.
I've enjoyed most of your writing, so I'm sure anything that you chose to talk about would go down well. Particularly the book writing or Analytical Engine bits would interest me.
I know how you feel. I'm afraid rock solid QA regarding hardware support seems almost impossible unless you get the manufacturers on board. Apple obviously has it easy in this regard.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure the support for laptops is more dependable than the support for desktops, especially if you go for an unexciting configuration with Intel graphics etc.
The Magazine (Marco Arment's new app)
web 3.0 is here.
Open Graph: The End of Passive Sharing & Authenticated Referrals?
I know of no CalDAV and CardDAV synchronization apps which are open source and actually work.
Physicists devise test to see if we're living in 'The Matrix'
Google is creating a Nexus call center for device support
Going Above and Beyond The WordPress Coding Standards
For projects where I travel to a customer, I've switched to an all-inclusive day rate. However...

I quoted a project which I (thankfully) didn't get, based on the person I was talking to being in SC (few hours drive or short flight). Turned out the project would be onsite in North Dakota, which was a $1200 flight.

That was a lesson learned :)

Other than that, I still am primarily hourly, because I have multiple ongoing projects that don't lend themselves to 'day rate' work. Newer stuff I take on next year will likely be 'day rate' based, with travel and hotel expenses outside a short driving radius line-itemed.
The language barrier is definitely a problem for countries like Germany and it's startup industry (at least looking in from the outside it is). While they are one of the safer economies in Europe, and seem to be holding the whole thing together at the moment, their reputation for not taking risks would also prove problematic.

Then again, that's only the point of view from someone looking in, it's probably entirely different for German people themselves.
Whoever is offering stock as an income opportunity is not smart. And if you think stock is a passive income opportunity, you are dumb. Go read James Altucher.
I oversaw development at ITA for many years and can tell you the probability that they're going to port QPX to Java is nil. (Or perhaps NIL.)
You reached the correct conclusions empirically, but you could have saved a lot of time and effort by having the philosophy that would lead you to them. Or more specifically, an understanding of economics. I don't mean this to sound smug, or anything like that, I'm just saying that I went thru the same process you did- only I did it in 1998! and then because I didn't believe it, again in 2001. By 2001 I knew there would be a housing bubble, even though there were (at that time) no signs of one. Hell, 911 was the news at that time.

Some pointers to help you be able to make these kinds of predictions (and thus maybe look for better data for more interesting and profitable investments)--

The book "The creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffen (?) is the history of money in america, the federal reserve, and the "bailout cycle" that happens over and over every 20 years. (And people act outraged at the "bailouts" in 2008, as if it hasn't happened dozens of times before.)

And "economics in one lesson" by henry hazlitt-- you can find a free copy of this out of copyright book online if you google around. A great overview of economics, starting from the premise of the broken window fallacy and how it illustrates why so many efforts that sound plausible totally fail (like keeping interest rates low and making banks loan money to people who can't repay - the Clinton and Bush policies that led to the housing bubble.)

Also the topical articles at http://mises.org are great and that site also has around 900 free economics books you can download.

I went the options-spreads on canadian junior mining companies route, and I got out of the market in the summer of 2007 when I felt the crash was imminent. (I was a year early, but for that kind of deal you don't worry about not nailing the absolute top!)

Spreads might be something good for you too-- "Options as a strategic investment", by McMillan is the bible. (Using spreads I get better returns at much less risk than people who buy stocks directly.)

Economics is a lot like programming- the basics are easy but there's no end to what you can learn, and it gives you such great power-- especially when the rest of the world has as much understanding of the science as the average person does of writing software-- essentially none. And, even better, the people who create economic opportunity for you telegraph what they are going to do years in advance- they campaign on it, even!
Looking forward to attending very much!
Works in IE8. o.o
How is that working out for you, if you don't mind answering?
It's actually an MMO-hybrid, playable in singleplayer and co-op modes.

> We also plan to provide a version that allows private servers similar to Freelancer to be maintained and run by the pilot communities. These would support single and multiplayer space combat battles where teams could hone their skills without having to use the public servers.
Apart from the fact that they did have a regular donation page, what on earth is stopping you from donating "via" the download page? For all intents and purposes this is the donation page.
Don't Ubuntu publish company accounts?
Not only heartbreaking, it's literally the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of humankind.

If I cried constantly, for the age of the universe, times infinity, it would not be enough to express the sadness I feel.

An infinite number of oceans the size of the Sun would not be enough to capture all our tears.
When I read about Node.js, the first selling point people mention is how you can reuse code on the client and server sides. For me, the main selling point is that it's Javascript. When I see new variants of js, developed to "fix" js, it makes me want to cry.
For me, it is that the free QR reader apps on Android insist on strip-mining my phone....
Oh, fabulous! That's great news, thanks a lot.
Go download Qriket app for your iPhone. It lets you scan QR codes and win money. Not a tedious task that will net you $20 per day.
Use TypeScript!
And you want to make it worse by getting us to click through to their website?
Really irks me there isn't a tool I can download to setup emulators that mimick actual released devices - trying to find the settings and set it up manually is a real PITA.
Link to Steve Yegge's post:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSK...
There is also Flagon's Den this evening if anyone else fancies going: http://london.flagonsden.com/
UX is Simple
Why are tablets and smartphones insulated from tough economic conditions?
What exactly is the point here? If you want to write C#, just use ASP.NET and MVC 4. You will certainly save yourself a lot of headaches, and you can still do everything async, etc. From what I can tell, the purpose of Node.js is to reduce the number of technologies that a web dev has to use and understand. You already need to use JavaScript on the client side, so using the same thing on the server side allows code reuse, knowledge sharing, etc.

It seems like what the author really wants is ASP.NET on the server, and Script# on the client side. Then the whole stack is C#. Or perhaps he would find TypeScript an acceptable middle-ground on the client. But I don't understand why you would choose Node.js on the server if you hate JavaScript, does not compute.
Email me: brennan@planscope.io
It works great here on both ubuntu (xps 13 laptop) and android (Jelly Bean) with the latest chrome.
Call me a special little snowflake, but why is he eating in the photo? I have a hard time taking the article seriously with a profile pic like that.

Anyone else feel it's a distracting photo, and perhaps even disrespectful to the reader?
Show HN: a refreshing JavaScript datepicker
Mando's chainless e-bike is headed for Europe in 2013 (w/ Video)
Works great here, galaxy nexus on jellybean with chrome.
Just redirect calls from Rogers and other toll-free numbers to your voice mail
Why come here to ask? Go forth and learn, my friend ... :-)
A lot of negativity here. I like the redesign quite a lot. I don't think every website redesign needs to usher in its own new UI paradigm. I'm betting eBay has the data that shows many people click on a listing, look at the picture, then press the back button. Putting pictures front and center saves the user time. And it puts it on sellers to provide good pictures instead of just the stock photos.
We think where we are is normal, slightly above us is where we ought to be.

'massively' above us is where we ought to be, is the way lots of SV denizens think.
SMO Fitzgerald Global - Managing Your Portfolio.
Good point. The hedonic treadmill and adaptation is a beast.
Readable Specs == Business Value
Not sure that knowing how a tcp connection is set up is a good good Q for networks. I have done the CCNA and Wirless CCNA but that is not something I keep memorised

Decribing the diference between cuircuit switched and packet switched is s godd one or if one wishes to get tricky and sort out the players from subs "what layer is MIDI in the ISO stack"

And MIDI is NOT a presentaion layer protocol :-)
Ruby can lisp, too.
Reason to use Node.js on the server without liking Javascript: I like the framework. Framework != language (or at least it should be).
He's blogged a lot about food & recipes in the past. Built and sold a recipe site. It's his personal blog so I guess he can put whatever he wants on it?
Angry Birds Overturn The Book Publishing Cart
Doesn't work on WP7 either.
Great job on the implementation, examples, and documentation, but personally I don't like these kind of buttons. They don't look like buttons. Take the text away that usually specifies an action (like 'download', 'submit', 'buy now') and all you have is a rectangular coloured box.
"First they took away Flash, but I didn't care because I was not a Flash developer..."

Whatever your stance is on Flash, this is a scary development if you don't like walled gardens.
Investigating DynamoDB 5sec latency
Still. iPhone (only) tailored web-development has taken the web back into the "this site was designed for MSIE" abyss.

Guessing if things posted on HN will work in browsers and OSes I use (non provided by Apple, for highly ethical reasons) is a daily game of chance.

Is that really what we want? Is that the future we want? Wasn't this what we all shunned Microsoft for doing?
This is probably not your ordinary type of passive income, but it's income for work I would otherwise be doing anyway, so hopefully it counts.

I run Correlated (http://www.correlated.org), a site that publishes one surprising correlation a day, using data generated by readers.

It was never really intended to be a money-making project, although I did give display ads and affiliate links a try, with very little success.

And then ... a book deal fell into my lap.

I had been shopping around a book proposal for "Experiments on Babies" (http://www.experimentsonbabies.com), and one of the publishers that was interested in that book also happened to note that I was the creator of Correlated, and asked if I would be interested in a separate deal to turn Correlated into a book.

I got a very nice advance for the two book deals, and in the case of Correlated, the writing involved is, for the most part, what I'd be doing anyway, deal or no deal.
"One example of how an MVP can manifest is dummy landing pages."

This is not a minimum viable product, it is a minimum viable ad. A product implies you have actually built something. Please do not belittle the act of actually building something any more than it already is.
I got a matte display to avoid reflections, but apparently someone found a workaround...
this has been around for quite some time. why do you think some infomercials offer products that won't ship for 2 months? kick starter has just made it more obvious that it is a presale.
EXAI Website Builder
Really. Air is AS3 (which can be Flex or not) packaged to run as (standalone) desktop app, android and ios.

Also Flex is now open source and continues to be one of the best cross plattform dev frameworks.
My initial reaction was oh noo how dare they take something away from me, I then realised I have chrome.

I then got thinking, as a default for a browser that will end up in corporate desktops and home users that this is actualy a realy nice move. I'm sure there will be some registry hack to negate this, but for the common user who lacks the ability to do that are perhaps best left with there internet L plates attached.

In summary, big fat +1 from me on this as anybody who is able to bypass this hurdle will be alot less likely to fall foul of this safty net. Less infected PC's, less spam, less crap in general.

Lets not also forget the big benefit this betowes upon us, less calls from friends who's PC's/Internet seems to be running a little slower and after 15 minutes on the phone you realise it will be easier to see them.
http://www.balsamiq.com/ and many others too
I think there's a difference between languages designed to compile down to JS (e.g. CoffeeScript) and wanting to convert a completely different language (e.g. Ruby or C#) into JS.

JavaScript has a lot of good and bad parts, and given we don't really have an option of choosing to use something else in its place I strongly believe that (some) languages that compile to JS have their place. While I don't believe all of them are useful (i.e. dart, typescript) they're specifically targetted as an alternative to JavaScript.

If you're trying to convert a different programming language, that isn't based around the way JavaScript does things then I firmly believe you're doing something wrong. JavaScript isn't just remembering that the semi-colon is optional and that JSON is wonderful. While other languages support event driven behaviour, JavaScripts implementation is (probably) different meaning there's still a learning curve. The documentation for Node.js is, unsurprisingly in JS. The libraries are JS. The whole ecosystem is JS. At least with CoffeeScript quite a few libraries have their source as .coffee, and the style of programming is identical to the compiled JS.
Developers, myself included, may not care about IE as a browser, but the vast majority of the people using my web applications most certainly do as they are using IE. So I care about IE in that I have to field a lot of support requests for it and ensure that the JavaScript I wrote doesn't bomb out on a dangling comma. Those IE users also pay my employer a lot of money to use those web applications to get their jobs done. So yes, people, as in civilian non-developers, do care about IE, quite a bit in fact.
If Mark planned all along to just cash himself out and f everyone else over that would explain the $1.4M ZNGA spends a year on his personal security (an extremely outsize sum for the size of organization he runs)
http://blog.games.com/2012/04/11/zynga-ceo-mark-pincus-1-mil...
MVC is actually pretty damn clunky. It has a lot of built-ins which are just frustrating (like IPrincipal, ugh). Also there are loads and loads of weird quirks that pop up as soon as you start trying to do anything like returning JSON.

MVC was a huge step forward from the old ASP.Net, but it's still making a lot of frankly odd decisions or suddenly bizarre behaviours in the background (e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1975983/how-can-i-disable...)

I think one of the reasons node.js is so great is that it just cuts out almost everything and gives you direct control over what is returned. MVC still mucks around with everything trying to be 'helpful' as it's really built on ASP.Net in the background.

To many of us, javascript is still one of the worst mainstream language around today.

Still, why not just make node.cs instead one wonders? Perhaps the existing ecosystem.
Sidenote: Node.js isn't a framework, it's a platform.
I really need to start being more sociable inside tech circles like this.
Vampires of the Cloud
We got hit by a wave of deprecation on Twitter yesterday
1. This is a funny one, and is the main reason why I'm getting my wife the new one.

My wife loves her Kindle but when we're reading in bed together the sound of her clicking the button drives me up the wall. She likes that she can use a larger font so she doesn't need glasses, but that just means way more clicks-per-minute. I think she's pressed the button so many times it's worn out a bit because it makes a very distinct 'click'. After a while each one is like a gun shot in my ear.
Tldr: Explain why you want to go, and why you think you should be picked, and grouper may potentially fund a trip to hack stuff ( preferably their stuff but also your own )

My own question: What is the definition of a skilled hacker? Are they looking for white hat hackers? What sort of achievments would count to demonstrate this? Writing some great software? Full pen test analysis and attack vectors on some software?

Considering this is "hacker news" this is a pretty vague offer.
Brian Eno's New App Redefines The Concept Of An Album
Thought: in-app "pro" version to take advantage of the fact that people pay $$$ for wedding stuff? Keeps you in the top music list because you're cheap, but some of the more advanced features might be worth a premium.

(Note: I had "pro" as much as the next version, but seems better than a multi-hundred dollar DJ)
Ah, that explains it. And yes, unless he lives in North Korea, he can do whatever he wants.

My apology to the author of the post. If I knew about the recipe sites I would have never questioned it.
I'm genuinely curious which feature(s) of node you like better than ASP.NET. I have used both and find them quite similar as far as "raw" capability. ASP.NET however has all of the things you were asking for: great Intellisense, great tooling (for instance integration with Entity Framework), great libraries available (such as SignalR), code in C# or any .NET language (including F#), rich async support...

I like node too, but to me, the reason to choose it is either if you want to remain platform-neutral, or if you really like Javascript.
FWIW, I've found NancyFx[0] fairly non-clunky as far as .NET goes. It's more of an analogue for Sinatra than Node.js, though.

[0] https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy
Great read, but it's odd the article didn't mention Edward Bernays, the originator of public relations (and nephew of Freud). Bernays preferred the term 'propaganda', but after he discovered Goebbels had used his book "Crystalizing Public Opinion" to steer German public opinion towards consent of the holocaust, he stopped using the name.

He also invented advertising as we now know it. Before Bernays it was "Brand X doesn't wear out", after it was "Brand X: the man's choice". Among his works are "The Business of Propoganda" and "Engineering of Consent" (hmm... that sounds familiar).

Bernays is only on my intellectual radar because of this mesmerizing Adam Curtis documentary:
http://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/
Settings, Show Advanced Settings, Content Settings (under Privacy heading), Do not show images (under Images heading). I think that's an extra click to enable Advanced Settings that Midori doesn't have?

Disabling images is a feature. It adds complexity. Yet you're using it as an example of how Midori might allow you to be more secure more easily.

It's the same situation with some of the complex features of Chrome that Midori doesn't have. It's not as simplistic as simple vs. complex, it's a more complicated cost/benefit tradeoff.
Agreed, if you're forced to use C#, Nancy at least does it sanely (and RESTfully!).
It's coupled to the "split personality" of the Windows 8 UI. If you start IE from desktop mode, you get "desktop IE", with desktop UI conventions, and web sites with flash will still work. If you select IE off the browser tile in the formerly-Metro "start screen", you get mobile-style UI conventions, and flash breaks unless you're on the whitelist.

Either they're expecting everyone who uses flash in a significant way to get whitelist approvals (and how many people do they have vetting those, anyway?), or they don't mind a period where, from the user's perspective, stuff randomly breaks for reasons that are not likely to be apparent. (Even if you tell them "well, it's how you started the browser fifteen minutes ago", they'll ask, "and why should that matter?" They have a point.)
I think without this ability to "game" the system SO wouldn't be half as good as it is now. You end up with brilliant and above all complete answers that can be kept up to date, and the moderation policy reduces duplication and clutter, keeping the SNR high.

Sure, some people might be motivated only by receiving high scores, but it seems that the benefits outweigh the potential for abuse
I have a kobo touch and I love it. My advice is:

- buy a simple ereader.

- Turn Off everything you can: the store, wifi, 3g, recommendations, awards, share, ads.etc ANything with an off button.

- Once a month or three load it up with some books that you would like to read. Just books. Not too many. Choose, then load.

Basically, de-gadgetize it. Make it into a book. A nice, light book.

Our computer world is a hell of distractions. To me, any reminder that I'm reading on a "device" that can do other things is unwelcome. Even recharging the device breaks the illusions for me.

I was initially frustrated that I didn't have a convenient way o get short PDFs, blog posts and such onto the device. Now I'm glad. Short-form articles would just put me into browsing mode.

The upshot of all this is that unless the manufacturers can get better at things they are already very good at (eg weight, battery life), I want the old cheap one. I don't want any new features.

My default position is suspicion of every "feature." I hear "paperwhite screen" My immediate reaction is I don't want it to feel more like a screen & I don't want it to feel more like a screen and I don't want a brightness button.
I think the best benchmark for this is to look at the industries where performance matters and see what they are using. Take high-frequency trading where lowest latency makes the most money. I don't see many using the JVM. AFAIK it's all assembly, C and C++. If they could use the JVM and have faster code, they would be doing so.
2013 hackNY Fellows Program
Jerky too on my SGS II
Wacko in the Morning - The Presidential Poll here on BTR 10/11 by Wacko Bob
Good... nice ... but they don't look like buttons.

I tested with my mother, with my grandma, and my girlfriend. The buttons doesn't work.

But the site is nice.
Interesting... I'm trying to think up an actual use for it now.
You'd be surprised. Every Halloween they make a resurgence. Considerable developer effort goes into keeping pictures of the damn things off the (U-rated) front page of certain large e-commerce sites.
Can Starting a Business Help You Find Employment?
I like it it. More compontents would be great, but there is always hope that those will come in the future :)
Upvoting this just so more people have a chance to see it. Although judging from when I was there, I'm not sure if you guys really need even more members!